Assessment of the fire detection limits using SEVIRI/MSG sensor

Forest fires represent the main cause of forest degradation in Italy and in the Mediterranean area countries. This phenomenon, progressively increasing, reached an average of 11000 fires per year in the period 1990-2000 with the destruction of 553,000 ha of vegetated areas in the Italian peninsula. It has high relevance also for other countries in the region such as Spain, Portugal, Greece, France. Damages caused by forest fires have a direct economic impact related to the cost of burned wood, and the cost of the activities of prevention, firefighting and recover of burned areas. Less easy is the estimate of the economic impact of forest loss as part of the eco-system (reduction of the hydro-geological defenses, spoiling of tourist and landscape attractions, etc.). An efficient way to manage this problem involves an observation system able to provide a prompt detection and monitoring of fires and a synoptic view of the area of interest Thus, satellites seem to be the ideal instrument for this purpose, even if the temporal frequency of the observations is generally still a problem. In several previous paper the capability of setting up an early fire detection system using the sensor SEVIRI (Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager) on board of the geostationary satellite MSG (Meteosat Second Generation) has been demonstrated. The present paper aims at assessing the limits of the SEVIRI sensor in detecting fires taking into account the spatial resolution of this sensor and the new algorithms especially developed to exploit its temporal resolution characteristics. The assessment of the limits of this sensor performances will be obtained mainly comparing its results with those obtainable from higher resolution sunsynchronous sensor data (MODIS and ASTER).